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What xtas can do for you

easy access to numerous text processing and analysis tools

full support for Dutch and English

can use Elasticsearch for document storage

can be run as a service

xtas is a collection of natural language processing and text mining tools, brought together in a single software package with built-in distributed computing and support for the Elasticsearch document store.

xtas functionality consists partly of wrappers for existing packages, with automatic installation of software and data; and partly of custom-built modules coming out of research. Currently offered are various parsers for Dutch and English (Alpino, CoreNLP, Frog, Semafor), named entity recognizers (Frog, Stanford and custom-built ones), a temporal expression tagger (Heideltime) and a sentiment tagger based on SentiWords.

A basic installation of xtas works like a Python module. Built-in package management and a simple, uniform interface take away the hassle of installing, configuring and using many existing NLP tools.

xtas’s open architecture makes it possible to include custom code, run this in a distributed fashion and have it communicate with Elasticsearch to provide document storage and retrieval.